Corporates love iPhone, iPad more than Android kit

True, says Good

Good Technology makes BlackBerry-style infrastructure and client software for big businesses. Good is popular with a fair few corporates, and it released some interesting data last night about the mobile platforms these giants are implementing.

The bottom line: they favour iOS over Android, by a very big margin.

Data for the four month from March to June 2011 inclusive shows iPhone activations - devices linked to the Good network - ran at just under 50 per cent of the total. In March, they exceeded 50 per cent, but bobbed along just under that figure during the following three months.

Android phone activations likewise peaked in March - at 28 per cent - and then dipped to a mean of 24 per cent for the next three months.

What's worse for fans of the Google OS is not that Android activations were lower than iPhone additions to the Good network, but that iPad activation levels were higher too, peaking at 30 per cent in May, up from 20.5 per cent in March. Its Q2 average was 27.2 per cent.

Android tablet activations barely troubled the scorer.

They amounted to 3.1 per cent of tablet activations in Q2. iPads accounted for 95 per cent of tablet activations.

The points to take from this are that corporates - those using Good, at least, most of them US firms - are massively pro iOS, and that the iPad is making big inroads into big business. Neither iPhone nor iPad can be written off as either consumer or media fripperies.

That said, the consumer market is huge, and that's where the real battle between iOS and Android is being fought. Apple is by far the leading hardware vendor, but in operating system terms it's now very definitely second fiddle. ®